Working in the Garden

The work on my garden has been completed in stages. One aspect of the work is my son’s availability to do the work. He has a full time job, a wife and three kids, not to mention a house under renovation, wood to cut for winter and a garden to plant.

The first step was to clean out all the overgrown, gone-wild perennials that had been untended for years. Once that was done, I purchased three black trellises to fill the wall space, and give the garden some height. My son gave me some hostas, as I like green more than flowers.

On Monday he came by after work and took out the old brick edging, cut a new and straighter edge, and replaced the brick in an edging 2 bricks wide, rather than the angled on edge edging that was there before.

My granddaughter had her first soccer game that evening so the rest of the family met here for pizza before taking off for the game. I like these times when my son is here, we seem to have some good conversations, and when the kids come I get the bonus of a visit with the grandkids.

We had a special moment, a shared memory.

When he was little, my son loved to work with his Dad. He was tireless, always willing to take on any job assigned to him. I remember one day he and his father had been cutting wood at the wood lot and came home with a truck load of firewood, cut and split. Now the task was to unload all the wood from the bed of the truck.

The young lad was in the bed of the truck, tossing wood down to the ground where his father picked up the chunks of wood and stacked them. They had a pretty good rhythm going until…. I don’t know whether the kid was getting tired, or his Dad was slower because he was picking up two pieces of wood at a time but, the boy tossed out a chunk of wood just as his Dad bent down behind the truck and, you got it, got clipped in the head by the flying wood.

So here we were, the other day, my son on his hands and knees placing the bricks in place and he asks his 6 year old daughter to hand him a brick. Kids being kids, she stayed where she was, picked up a brick and tossed it in her Dad’s direction, just missing his head.

I was standing beside him and I could see his immediate response was anger, but when he looked up he caught my eye and we both started to laugh. “Unloading a truck full of wood,” I said. “Do you remember that day, hitting your Dad with the hunk of wood?”

These special moments, sharing old memories, and spending time with family, are much more important than the garden, though seeing the garden come alive is a joy in itself.